Iron Sky’s Moon Nazis: Shock Troops in Nordic Genre-Film Invasion

Iron Sky director Timo Vuorensola brings his sci-fi satire about moon Nazis to South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, for its North American premiere.Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired

AUSTIN, Texas — Iron Sky is a movie about moon Nazis. The hook is brilliant — they had us at “moon Nazis” — but given that outrageous premise, the resulting film could easily have wound up as B-movie nonsense. Surprisingly, Iron Sky succeeds as a wickedly fun adventure comedy.

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Though made on a relatively small budget well outside the Hollywood system — the director, production team and visual effects crew are all Finnish, and the filmmakers gathered financing from Finland, Germany, Australia and from a web-based donor campaign — Iron Sky exhibits all the swagger and spectacle required to become a mainstream hit when it arrives in U.S theaters later this year.

“In Finland, nobody has done a film with so many special effects,” says Iron Sky director Timo Vuorensola, who estimates there were 890 effects shots in the film, roughly as many as in the last Transformers movie. “But our budget was about the same as the catering budget on the Transformers movie.”

It’s the latest in a string of inventive indie science fiction and fantasy films to come from the northernmost edge of Europe. Iron Sky saw its U.S. premiere here at the South by Southwest Film festival the same weekend as Thale, a thriller from Norway about a mythical species of murderous wood nymphs. These new films follow on the heels of André Øvredal’s Norwegian mockumentary The Troll Hunter, Jalmari Helander’s Rare Exports (a 2010 thriller about a demonic Santa Claus discovered in the Finnish mountains) and 2009’s Stig Larsson-penned Metropia, an animated sci-fi tale from Sweden about an oil-starved Europe’s descent into dystopia.

“Right now, the region is one of the most robust places for cool films,” says Tim League, an expert on genre films and the founder of Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse Cinema chain, which hosts the annual Fantastic Fest and regularly screens indie films.

“Since we’ve been supporting genre film from the region, we’ve built a great relationship with Norwegian Film Institute,” he says. “Traditionally, they’ve dealt with more high-minded films, but they’ve definitely seen the potential in genre film in the last few years.”

League says these horror, sci-fi and dark fantasy films are mostly coming from a new generation of Scandinavian directors, all relatively young men in the same age bracket. The movie that kick-started the trend: a 2006 horror flick from Norway called Cold Prey. “What we’re seeing is an extension of that,” League says.

These films are all made on small budgets. Cold Prey cost roughly $2 million, and Thale cost less than half that. Iron Sky is a much more ambitious picture, with loads of grandiose effects, but even this sci-fi romp cost a remarkably small 7.5 million Euro (around $11 million) to make. (About 10 percent of that was raised through an internet-based donor program and merchandise sales.)

Jim Kolmar, a film programmer for South by Southwest, thinks there’s definitely something bubbling up in Nordic cinema. In fact, it’s been brewing since Häxan (English title: Witchcraft Through The Ages), a 1922 Swedish/Danish documentary that plays like a horror film.

“It isn’t an entirely new thing,” he said. “There’s always been a strong tradition for dark fantasy in the region, going all the way back to Carl Dryer’s Vampyr, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. We’re just starting to really notice this genre of films that are all working through these certain fantasy themes.”

Like Troll Hunter and Thale, the moon Nazi movie takes an element of European consciousness and spins it into something fantastically original. In Iron Sky’s goofball alternative history, the Nazis have fled to the dark side of the moon, escaping in secret at the end of World War II. There, they’ve set up a swastika-shaped moon base and busied themselves building a fleet of war machines: flying saucers, giant zeppelin aircraft carriers and a comically massive warship. In 2018, they decide to re-invade the Earth, where the U.S. president (played by Stephanie Paul) looks an awful lot like Sarah Palin.

Iron Sky's leading ladies: Stephanie Paul, left, plays the President of the United States, and Julia Dietze stars as Nazi ingénue Renate Richter.Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired

A production still from Iron Sky shows the moon Nazi's invasion fleet.

For a sci-fi feature with complicated set design and hundreds of visual effects shots, an $11 million budget amounts to peanuts. But Iron Sky doesn’t look cheap by any means. The dazzling visuals are as good as what you’d see in a Hollywood production with 10 times the budget.

To bring the retro-futuristic vision to the screen, director Vuorensola teamed up with producer and visual effects designer Samuli Torssonen. The two had worked together previously on the cult hit Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, their 2005 Star Trek parody that made heavy use of digital effects.

About half of Iron Sky was shot on real sets, and the other half was shot in front of green screens. Especially in the Nazi’s moon base, the hard sets where the actors stood were real, but anything beyond 15 or 20 feet was digitally painted in post-production.

“This gave us the opportunity to create very big, cavernous spaces,” Vuorensola says.

The bigger the better — Vuorensola spent years researching the Nazi’s war machines, and he says that as the end of World War II approached, the Germans were building bigger and bigger tanks and rockets. Eventually, the size of the hardware reached the level of absurdity, with the tanks being so large they couldn’t be driven properly.

Everything in Iron Sky is oversize — not just the base itself, but the giant zeppelins that serve as interplanetary aircraft carriers, the boilers and gears that fill the bowels of the war machines, and the Nazis’ room-size, steampunk computers.

“Their technological innovation stalled in 1945,” Vuorensola says. “Ever since, they’ve just been perfecting and improving what they already had, making it bigger.”

Biggest of all is the Gottedammerung, the giant warship the Nazis have been constructing over the past 70 years. Its massive bulk looks to be several miles across. The propulsion system at its center is a mess of clanking gearworks. When the thing lifts off from the surface of the moon for the movie’s big showdown, the spectacle is ripe with silliness.

When you’re making a movie about Nazis who live on the moon, historical accuracy is probably not your primary concern.

When you’re making a movie about Nazis who live on the moon, historical accuracy is probably not your primary concern. But most of the Nazi technology in Iron Sky is simply an extension of ’40s-era innovation. (One concession added by the filmmakers is the Nazi’s discovery and use of antigravity: “We had to think of some way for them to get to the moon in the first place,” Vuorensola says.) Other pieces of the plot are crafted from historical insight, such as the concept of eugenics, a policy the real Nazis engaged in that their lunar descendants have kept alive.

It’s all wrapped up in a sci-fi spoof that drew loads of attention even before its premiere.

“It’s been a while since anyone’s been as excited about a film so esoteric and weird,” said SXSW’s Kolmar. “It’s a classic midnight movie.”

So, what new fantastic stories can we expect to shine forth from the land of the midnight sun, where the Nordic fascination with sci-fi, fantasy and the supernatural produces some exceedingly creative cinema?

Iron Sky’s effects master Torssonen has teamed up with the film’s co-producer Tero Kaukomaa to launch a new visual effects company, Troll VFX, that will serve the European film industry. Kaukomaa is also producing a “werewolf inversion” feature called Human and working with Iron Sky helmer Vuorensola to develop a sci-fi television series aimed at an international audience.

No word yet on whether it will feature moon Nazis, forest nymphs or giant trolls.